Brain One

By Steve Xerri, from Making Music
magazine, November 1990. Kindly typed and supplied by Neil
Scrivin.

Brian Eno wants the simple and the great, and
not just in his synthesisers. Steve Xerri has a rare chance to meet the
thoughts behind the face.

What everyone and their uncle knows about Brian Eno
is that he's clever, and that he talks a lot - not in rock star mumbles but in
elegant and coherent paragraphs, displaying knowledge of everything from art
theory to evolutionary science. This intellectual reputation seems to fit hand
in glove with his general image as a boffin, an electronics wizard who purports
to be a non-musician and creates cool linear music designed to slow your
heart-rate rather than quicken it.

When the record-company person who greets me at
the door of Brian Eno's London flat tells me, "Brian's on the phone to New
York, but he'll be with you shortly," it sits perfectly with the lifestyle you
might imagine for a man now less pop star than busy entrepreneur, fosterer of
the post-glasnost Soviet rock scene, and creator of video installations in
Tokyo, Paris, Milan and assorted cultural hotspots the world over. I couldn't
help but wonder whether he would have been made remote by 18 years as a public
figure, inhabiting the Eno persona. Surrounded as he is by whole systems of
corporate people metering out his time - management company, record company, PR
company, all of whom I've had to talk to for six months to get here - will he
be unapproachable in person? I remember back to 1973: I am in the front row of
an Eno and the Winkies gig shortly after the release of his first solo album.
In the middle of 'Blank Frank' a pertly pouting Eno, in full make-up and a
fetching off-the-shoulder lurex top, approaches his synthesiser - a
delicate-looking affair with more connecting leads than a telephone exchange -
and, to my shock, proceeds to whack hell out of the thing. For some reason, I
find this memory comforting. I am further reassured when a burst of
mock-operatic singing announces that his phone-call is over: and by the time a
smiling Eno has clucked "check-check-check" like a hen into my tape-recorder to
test for level, I know it's going to be fine...

ORGANIC MACHINERY

Widely regarded as a technical innovator, Brian Eno
recently came out with the rather surprising remark that he thought
synthesisers made too many noises, and that a bit of simplifying wouldn't go
amiss. Does that mean he hankers after the old days of the EMS in a suitcase?
"I still have one," he laughs. "I not only hanker after them, I still am in
those days in some parts of myself." He pauses. "If I can now refine those
comments, what I would like is a synthesiser which, as soon as you switch it
on, does something interesting and great: the major activity of most musicians
now is changing little things or trying to find the sound that will save the
world. It's hopeless, this thing of first scrolling through 20 pages to find
what you want and then changing it, and then finding that wasn't what you
wanted to do, scrolling back through another nine pages... It's just so
pathetic, so primitive. My argument for simpler synthesisers is not that I want
to strip away all the sophistication: what I want to do is to present the
levels of sophistication differently."

Eno draws a contrast between synthesisers and
audio equipment such as the H3000 Eventide Harmoniser ("a fantastic toy") which
offers the user layers of expertise: "One of them is a very simple level, and
it does very obvious things, like you turn the knob and the delay gets longer
or shorter. Then there's another level that says 'expert' which is harder to
grasp because it changes the whole architecture of the program - the sequence
in which things happen and what modulates what. The problem with synthesisers
is that they've mixed all this up together; it's a hopeless jungle. So what you
find is that you're always dealing with the construction of the whole
synthesiser each time you want to work. To change timbre on a DX7, for example,
is a huge job; it takes you half an hour."

Most people, he says, therefore work from sounds
that come with the instrument, or from a program bought off the shelf. He
doesn't: and despite his reservations, he uses a DX7 a lot. "It's my main
synthesiser by far, and I find it more and more interesting," he says. His
reluctance to let go of it in favour of the latest hardware seems at odds with
someone famed for his pioneering mentality. Eno gives a slightly sheepish laugh
and adds, "I keep thinking, 'God, I must get something else.' I mean, the DX7
is pretty prehistoric now, but I've become familiar with it."

ACCRETIONS

That familiarity is important for the way he makes
music but, typically, he goes to another art-form for a metaphor, explaining,
"If you draw, then you know what a 2H pencil is like as opposed to a 2B, say,
and the more you understand the characteristics of it. I never - or really very
rarely - get into that situation you see most people with synthesisers in, of
going through 500 sounds and finding that most of them don't work. I listen to
a piece of music and hear a kind of niche; I think, 'I know a sound that would
work really well in there', and that will direct me to a group of five, maybe
six, similar sound programs, and I'll find one of those - that's usually the
most difficult part because my note-keeping is so disorganised - but I will
eventually find it and then I'll modify it, tweaking it this way and that to
fit precisely."

Tool, work: to hear Eno use demystifying words
like these reveals something of his attitude to his music and the machines he
uses to make it - the description of his hard-won skills with the DX7 isn't
meant to set him apart from the rest of us, but to show how the ordinary
activities we all go through, like learning and labouring, can place the
machine at the service of the musician rather than the other way round - if the
machine is a good one. "Someone at Yamaha told me that 80 per cent of the
synthesisers returned for maintenance work had never been reprogrammed in any
way at all," recalls Eno. "And I said, 'Well you shouldn't blame people: not
all musicians are stupid - they're quite bright, a lot of them! But if the
machine is in its very construction a disincentive to those kind of changes,
then it's your fault; it's a design problem not a user problem."

Hence his vision of the ideal synthesiser having
echelons of control; this wouldn't prevent access to deeper levels of
programming, but would hive off a really basic top level of general controls -
he likens the whole business to the tone-control and switchable pick-up
positions electric guitars have. The synthesiser is in any case for Eno only
one element in a chain also involving sound-processors, miking-up procedures
and the acoustic of the room he's in. I suggest that half the fun with old
synthesisers was that you changed things in performance or could just try
twiddling something to see what happened. "Exactly," replies Eno decisively,
"and that's what it should be again, I think."

Curiouser and curiouser - can this really be Eno,
that champion of the new, urging a return to the past? What does he feel about
sampling, then - surely a great temptation to someone legendarily supposed to
thrive on treating sound? He laughs, "A friend of mine said to me a little
while ago, ' The interesting thing about you is that you're either years late
or years early.' I've been quite negative about sampling in the past, not
because of its possibilities but because of its general usage. What I find
objectionable is this confusion - a sort of literate way of working on music.
Horns - you see this word horns, so you think you've got horns: that's nothing
to do with listening. If you listen, you see that it isn't horns; I don't know
what it is, but it isn't horns! It's not to do with fidelity: who cares whether
it's a 20K bandwidth or half a K? That's not the issue. Once you start actually
listening, you stop going through that codified behaviour that says, 'Horns -
they do this kind of thing; strings - they do this kind of thing.' It's just
lazy."

IDIOT GLEE

The longer we chat, the clearer it becomes: it
isn't the cold mechanics of music-making that compels Brian Eno's interest, but
the human activity of which it is one example. In that, he is on the side of
the angels, rating something which was useful or something which might in the
future make better use of our resources (even if it's only our ears) above
something designed to be fashionable now which is inconvenient or obstructive
in use.

So it is with sampling: notice that it's not the
principle itself that he rejects ("A lot of the potential of samplers is
something that I look forward to...") but the limit it all too often places on
the creative thinking of it's human user. "I'm very frightened," he confides,
"of the kind of fix that a lot musicians get into, where they spend all of
their time just pissing about with new equipment, and their understanding of it
is terribly scant. I realise, of course, that scant understanding is sometimes
a very good basis for doing things. But what seems to happen is this dreadful
situation of people going through the manual all the time, going 'How does it
work? Oh, I can't... Oh well, that'll do."

The phrase 'that'll do' simply isn't part of Eno's
vocabulary: unless he can find a proper use for something, he steers clear of
it. "Some people have done interesting things with samplers - but I'm thinking
particularly of Jon Hassell [American trumpeter who blends together a
completely new amalgam from what he calls ' digital snapshots' of music from
many global sources]. He's someone that has really understood the philosophical
implications of sampling - what it means in terms of how we think about music
and other things. When I'm ready to enter on that level, I will."

It is his own exploration of the philosophical
implications of ways of making music that gives Eno sufficient poise to follow
his own inclinations and methods. If he is content to work without sampling, it
isn't because the DX7 will do, but because he understands how it's
imperfections are useful to him. Again he explains it in terms of visual art,
where a few deft strokes can be made to say more than an infinity of fussy
details: "The old idea of technology is that you increase options all the time,
you increase fidelity, you increase range. But decrease is also a powerful way
of working - like sculpture, taking things away." Another much-vaunted aspect
of digital technology is its ability to remember and reproduce sounds
precisely. Eno treats that with caution too, preferring to put his effects to
tape rather than add them at the mixdown stage. "I'm very convinced of this
point of view that says, 'If it sounds good now, get it now.' I either take it
then or I abandon it and do something else. To try to repeat is very soul
destroying, I think."

Over and over, Eno's replies have emphasised the
human part of the relationship with technology - the interest, the immediacy,
the sheer-enjoyment. He dropped out of doing pop songs "when I had felt for
some time that music was not such a thrilling activity as it had been" and he
has now returned to it after an absence of 12 years "mostly because I felt like
singing." The new material features some familiar Eno devices, such as using
the rigours of partnership with John Cale as a trigger on the new Cale/Eno
"Wrong Way Up" LP, or creating shimmering soundscapes on the two ambient albums
now in preparation. But there are new elements, too: a looser and wilder
rhythmic feel was in evidence on the rough mix I heard of the instrumental
'Juju Space Jazz', and Eno's vocals on the Cale collaboration show that he has
discovered a previously-hidden relaxed vibrato.

GHOST ECHOES

I ask Eno what he thinks about the proliferation
throughout the 1980s of relatively affordable home recording equipment. "I
think it's fine," he replies. "A lot of people criticise sequencers and sure,
sequencers have produced a lot of uniform music, where everything is locked
right onto the beat and it gets very tedious. But more importantly, they allow
people to think in terms that they might not be able to do otherwise, to create
structures and shuffle them around, like on a word processor. All these tools
are a great gift."

He then tells me a story about his cousin who runs
a music course for kids in Birmingham on a shoestring budget. Eno helped out by
donating some stuff he no longer needed, including an RX ll drum machine. The
cousin was wary of what he saw as a gimmick. "And I said", recalls Eno with
evident delight, "there aren't any gimmicks. Either everything is a gimmick or
nothing is. If you give this to an interesting child, they'll do something
interesting with it. You should go for as many gimmicks as you can," he
continues, with laughter surfacing as he speaks, "fill the classroom with
things that will make people think 'Wow, this is great, listen to this, cor!',
and something good will come of it."